Whether you work with low-stakes assessments, small-scale classroom assessments or large-scale, high-stakes assessment, understanding and applying some basic principles of item development will greatly enhance the quality of your results.

This is the first in a series of posts setting out item development steps that will help you create defensible assessments. Although I’ll be addressing the requirements of large-scale, high-stakes testing, the fundamental considerations apply to any assessment.

You can find previous posts here about item development including how to write items, review items, increase complexity, and avoid bias. This series will review some of what’s come before, but it will also explore new territory. For instance, I’ll discuss how to organize and execute different steps in item development with subject matter experts. I’ll also explain how to collect information that will support the validity of the results and the legal defensibility of the assessment.

In this series, I’ll take a look at:

These are common steps (adapted from Crocker and Algina’s Introduction to Classical and Modern Test Theory) taken to create the content for an assessment. Each step requires careful planning, implementation, and documentation, especially for high-stakes assessments.

This looks like a lot of steps, but item development is just one slice of assessment development. Before item development can even begin, there’s plenty of work to do!